School of Education Reading Comprehension & Précis I

BA. Ed group Semester 1

Pr. Zahra EL AOURI
________________________________________________________________________

The Findhorn Community: A garden of spirits

1 The earth is a showcase of beautiful gardens. The garden at Versailles, France, and the
Viceroy’s Palace Garden in India were designed as marvels of symmetry. The Butchart
Gardens in Victoria, Canada, has become a national historic site and an international tourist
attraction. Near Amsterdam, Holland, the Keuken
Keuken-hof
hof Garden displays rainbow rows of
tulips. There are gardens of all sizes and configurations, but in one of the most unlikely places
on the coast of northern Scotland, only one garden has ever produced 40
40-pound
pound cabbages and
eight-foot delphiniums.
2 In November 1962, Peter and Eileen Caddy and their colleague Dorothy Maclean
Mac
were fired
ired on short notice and without reason from the four
four-star
star hotel where they had been
living and working successfully for six years. They accepted their dismissal,
dismissal packed up their
belongings, and moved with the Caddys’ three small sons into a small touring caravan (a
British term for a motor home or RV). Local ordinances prohibited camping on the beach
beyond the summer season, so with nowhere else to go, the extended family relocated to a
small caravan park at Findhorn Bay, near the village of Findhorn, unt
until the spring, they hoped,
when hotels would reopen and they would find new employment.
3 Situated next to the unsightly village garbage dump, the Findhorn Bay Caravan Park
was one step above homelessness. Gale
Gale-force
force winds blew in regularly from the sea, scattering
debris in their paths. All that grew in the surrounding sand and gravel was scruffy gorse,
broom, brambles, quitch grass, and a few spiny fir trees. Peter chose a more private and
sheltered site for their caravan at the bottom of a hollow, but eeven
ven this was a far cry from the
comforts they had been used to. On their first day at the park, it began to snow. With no job,
no money, and no place to go, the group found themselves at the bottom of the barrel.
4 Peter, Eileen, and Dorothy, however, were no ordinary people. Peter had a military
background, but in his youth he had received training in positive thinking. A highly intuitive

1
man, he had come to believe in man’s duty to return the planet to a state of love and beauty.
Eileen and Dorothy were sensitives1, who received spiritual guidance while in a state of
meditation. During the 10 years they had been living and working together, they had come to
trust Eileen’s and Dorothy’s spiritual messages. If they continued to believe in their inner
directions and followed them to the letter, all their needs would be met.
5 Their first job was to clean up their living space and transform it with loving
vibrations. Three months of winter, however, was a long time for a family to be living in
close quarters under extreme weather conditions and on limited means. When Peter’s
unemployment benefits ran out, he collected eight pounds a week in welfare, which was
hardly enough for a family to live on. It became clear that they would have to grow a garden,
but none of them had gardening experience and nothing edible could possibly thrive in the
sand.
6 In the spring of 1963, Peter dug three trenches and buried the turf so that it would
break down into natural fertilizer. In the nine-by-nine-foot plot, he planted lettuce and
radishes. In a second patch, he sowed peas, runner beans, carrots, beets, and lettuce. To get
the sandy soil to absorb moisture, Peter watered it daily and repeatedly by hand. That spring,
Dorothy was told in one of her meditations that she had a job to do, and that was to harmonize
with the higher intelligence of nature. The source of her communication, the Devas (Deva is
Sanskrit for “being of light” or “shining one”), advised her to build compost piles to enrich
the soil, which is exactly what Peter did.
7 With no money to buy tools or materials, the novice gardeners were forced to use
whatever they could scrounge and collect. As if by magic, assistance started coming their
way. In the winter, Eileen had fled the confines of the caravan to meditate at night in a public
washroom, and on one occasion her guidance specified that they build a patio. One morning,
a load of concrete magically turned up in the ditch outside the park gate. When Peter needed
straw to cover his compost, a neighbor brought a bale of hay that happened to be lying on the
road, and he offered some old lumber that Peter used to build pathways, cold frames, and
fences. Neighbors donated horse and sheep manure, and a town shopkeeper gave the Caddys
leftover produce. What was too spoiled to eat, they added to their compost.
8 By May, the family was enjoying their first lettuce and radishes. Eileen’s guidance had
instructed her to purify their bodies and absorb cosmic energies by eating less dense and
refined foods. Instead of the rich five-course dinners with wine and brandy from their hotel
days, they began to consume fruit and garden vegetables with wheat germ, bread, and honey.
In addition to their diet, the pure air, sunlight, cold water, hard work, and exercise were doing

2
them good, and they planted leeks, celery, rutabagas, turnips, peas, and more radishes and
lettuce.
9 All along, Dorothy maintained contact with the Devas. Overseen by the Landscape
Angel, the Devas advised her to think of plants as divine and to radiate love and appreciation
to them. She was given precise growing instructions, and by June, the garden was like nothing
anyone had ever seen. Out of the sand grew tall, healthy and abundant vegetables. Their
Brussels sprouts reached two feet in height, whereas just across the way, they stopped
growing at two or three inches. Their blackberries were the only ones in the entire county to
produce fruit.
10 Five years later, 65 different vegetables, 21 kinds of fruit, and more than 40 medicinal
and culinary herbs were flourishing in the garden. Beautiful flowers and luscious trees were
turning the caravan park into a botanical garden and a major curiosity. Locals flocked to see
the wonders that were occurring at the site and to buy surplus produce. Horticulturalists,
professional gardeners, members of agricultural societies, lords and ladies—all were at a loss
to explain the beauty and bounty in terms of either traditional horticulture or organic
husbandry. Sir George Trevelyan, a respected scholar and educator, was astonished at the
superior quality of the vegetables and flowers. He could only conclude that something else—
Factor X—was at play, and that if Caddy’s methods were applied to the Sahara, surely roses
would bloom in the desert.
11 Of course, there were critics and skeptics, but the majority of visitors couldn’t help but
feel the spiritual power of the gardens and its residents. After Peter published a series of
pamphlets about the group’s experience, people from all walks of life and all over the world
came to see and believe, and many stayed. Like the garden, the family expanded into a
community, and the caravan park evolved into a New Age center of light. By embracing all
things and all beings as a part of creation and by cooperating fully with nature, Peter, Eileen,
and Dorothy turned a wasteland into an earthly paradise.
12 Although the Caddys have since died—Peter Caddy died in 1994 and Eileen in
2006— the community carries on, 50 years later, as a functioning ecovillage and innovative
learning place, and an enduring experiment in harmonious living.
--------------------
1Here, sensitive describes a person who has extrasensory perception and is able to receive messages or
sense things that normal human beings are not usually aware of.